SHADOWS IN THE GRASS (149 pp.)—Isak Dlnesen—Random House ($3.75).
A long time ago, in Africa, Isak Dinesen saw two lions attack an ox. Unarmed but for a stock whip, she flew at the kings of the jungle and lashed them into retreat.
Unarmed but for a pen, Isak Dinesen, 75, has spent the 27 years of her writing life routing the brute realities of the 20th century from her prose. Minute in output but masterful in style and content, Storyteller Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny) pursues gothic romance in preference to realism, the aristocratic spirit above democratic camaraderie, fate before fact. She is Denmark's finest living writer and one of the world's best. No less a fan than Ernest Hemingway told his 1958 Nobel Prize audience that the award should have gone to Isak Dinesen.
She calls her latest autobiographical book a "papyrus from a pyramid," and though it is not fiction, Shadows in the Grass is almost as remote as the medieval Persia and 19th century Italy in which Author Dinesen has sometimes set her tales. In Shadows, she reminisces about the decade (1921-31) when she ran a coffee plantation in the Ngong hill country of Kenya, an Africa now dead beyond recall and yet startlingly alive in these recollections. Characteristically, her theme —the relation of master and servant—would embarrass many contemporary writers to the roots of their social consciousness, but from her it evokes feudal harmonies rooted in a blood consciousness as profound as the roles of father and son, husband and wife. Her mood—dry, elegiac, wounded yet unbleeding—strongly echoes that of the aristocratic author of the brilliant 19th century Sicilian chronicle and recent bestseller, The Leopard; this somehow befits a woman whose African nickname was "Honorable Lioness" and whose real name and title are the Baroness Karen Blixen.
Dark Roots. What the baroness does in this book is scarcely tangible enough to describe. She dips a branch of memory into the pool of the past until it is crystallized with insights, landscapes, literature, and animals that seem as if painted by Henri Rousseau. Who else, one wonders, would have attained a great reputation as a healer merely by holding a Barua a Soldani, a letter from a king (Denmark's Christian X), to the chest of a young native writhing in agony from a badly fractured leg? As the letter became a relic, stiff with blood and grime, and passed from hand to hand in a cabalistic pouch, it also became "a covenant signed between the Europeans and the Africans —no similar document of this same relationship is likely to be drawn up again." Many writers affect to understand Africa; Author Dinesen accepts and respects its opacities ("All roots demand darkness"). She draws a memorable portrait of Farah, her face-conscious Somali majordomo, "unfailingly loyal, a cheetah noiselessly following me about at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding onto my finger with strong talons and turning his head right and left."